DIABOLICUM: Black Metal band hailing from Sweden. Swedish Metal is typically always good, Sweden has bands like AMON AMARTH, WATAIN and BATHORY, not to mention the love-it-or-hate-it band GHOST (GHOST B.C. in North America), so what kind of a streak can Sweden go on with bands and albums that metalheads love? Well there's only one way to find out.

So this is important to note, I've tried getting around to writing this multiple times, only one problem, the album didn't hold my attention long enough any time to write it. At this point, you can probably already guess how this write-up is gonna go - but don't worry I'll try to paint a picture for you, even though I just can't see art: The album opens with sound, its a burst of old Black Metal, the instrumentals are all bound together and for the most part its indistinguishable what's what and who's who. The vocals are practically inaudible throughout the entire album, since the level is so far below the instrumentals - particularly the drums - that it's a little hard to tell if there are vocals at some point or not. There are also vocal samples, someone talking, taken from speeches and what not, that are actually louder than the songs vocals themselves.

Naturally, with old Black Metal the drums are fairly basic and constant, the guitars are the same, nothing to over the top. Vocally, Kvarforth takes on more of a Death Metal sound, which although to anyone outside of the Metal community sounds "the same," to us inside this circle of judgement, his style of vocals don't contrast very well with the gritty rawness of Black Metal. Basically what I'm getting at here is, the levels of everything in this album seem a little wonky, almost like everything was mislabeled in the studio and no one really went back to check it. DIABOLICUM also should decide if they want to be Black Metal and change the vocal style to match it better or Death Metal and change the instrumentals to be more technical and less gritty.

All in all, "Ia Pazuzu" from DIABOLICUM has some minor issues that made it not very interesting to me. The simplest things can destroy us all, so as it stands this is how the album sounds to me and where it might be your thing, it's definitively not mine. I walked in with an open mind and walked face first into a wall, that's gonna make anyone turn around.